README.md

The ant colony system for the traveling salesman problem

Reference: Dorigo M, Gambardella L M.: Ant Colony System: A cooperative learning approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem. IEEE Tr. Evol. Comp. 1, 53-66[J]. 1997, 1(1): 53-66.

Reference: Dorigo M, Birattari M, Stutzle T. Ant colony optimization[J]. IEEE computational intelligence magazine, 2006, 1(4): 28-39.

Variables	Meaning
coord_x	List, the x coordination of cities
coord_y	List, the y coordination of cities
pop	The number of ants
iter	The maximum number of iterations
alpha	The pheromone decay parameter
beta	The parameter which determines the relative importance of pheromone versus distance
rho	The parameter for pheromone local updating rule
q0	The probability of exploitation versus exploration
city_num	The number of city
dis	List, dis[i][j] denotes the distance between city i and city j
tau	List, tau[i][j] denotes the pheromone between city i and city j
start_city	List, start_city[i] denotes the start city of ant i
iter_best	List, the best so-far value of each iteration

Example

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # Set the parameters
    pop = 20
    beta = 2
    q0 = 0.9
    alpha = 0.1
    rho = 0.1
    iter = 50
    city_num = 30
    min_coord = 0
    max_coord = 10
    coord_x = [random.uniform(min_coord, max_coord) for _ in range(city_num)]
    coord_y = [random.uniform(min_coord, max_coord) for _ in range(city_num)]
    print(main(coord_x, coord_y, pop, iter, alpha, beta, rho, q0))

Output:

{
    'Best tour': [24, 1, 6, 9, 5, 7, 13, 19, 22, 12, 0, 28, 17, 18, 21, 16, 11, 23, 3, 27, 20, 10, 25, 14, 26, 2, 15, 4, 8, 29, 24], 
    'Shortest length': 48.85205394844219,
}